That’s surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It’s a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

I’ve seen even people in their 40s using them. I don’t think that it’s a big deal, or that it’s too late for that.

Thank you! It’s working now.

It’s giving me an error, “Error Finding Entity // Make sure you spelled the entity correctly and that it exists!”, when I use my username for lemmy.ml; curiously it works well when I do it for my beehaw.org account.

Misleading name, on the same level as calling water “non-explosive hydrogen”. That said the material looks promising, as a glass replacement for some applications (the text mentions a few of them, like armoured windows).

(It is not a metal; it’s a ceramic, mostly oxygen with bits and bobs of aluminium and nitrogen. Interesting nonetheless, even if I’m picking on the name.)

I was wondering about what steps should be taken to quarantine (and possibly block/ban some of them) on the lemmy.ml instance?

I’ll tag two admins of the instance, as I don’t think that they’ll want this content: @[email protected], @[email protected]

A lot of those users are already doing shady shit. HinduSher for example is clearly squatting on multiple comms, among them three (!bakchodi, !bharatvarsh, !bharatvarsha) that, while not intrinsically associated with fascism, do provide enough context for his username.

It might reduce the problem but I don’t think that’ll solve it, as in some situations instances will still defed each other. For example, where an admin says “users from that instance break my rules, I don’t want to deal with it, defed time”.

It’s interesting how, by hosting your own instance, your view over Lemmy changes. I hope that self-hosters like you become more common.

I would rewrite the second sentence into “As such, content it doesn’t like is not possible to be hosted on their single, general-purpose instance.”

Or rather, “content not found in their single instance is not present in Reddit as a whole at all”.

That’s the point here - it’s true for Reddit but false for Lemmy, as content available in one instance doesn’t need to be hosted yet again in another.

Instance creation and management does not require coding skills. It’s a very different skill set, one of system administration and web hosting.

I phrased it poorly. What I tried to convey is that easier instance creation and management should be a priority for coders, so other people have an easier time hosting/managing their Lemmy instances.

That [interface devs should expect users to have 2+ accounts] is just a ugly workaround, I hope we can come up with something better.

Ugly workaround or not, I believe that this would be still sensible given the current state of Lemmy. Because when people want content from non-federated instances, here are their current solutions:

• Register on both, and keep two separated and partially overlapping feeds. It’s a bother, and eventually they will ditch the smaller feed.
• Look for an instance that happens to federate with both, and register there. That may or may not federate with a fourth instance with desirable content.
• Register on one and give up the other. Usually the one getting the short end of the stick is single-purpose, smaller, or more careful on whom they federate with.

So the current state of the things actively encourages you to hop into big, general-purpose instances. That is bad for the federation, and it aggravates the “three groups to rule you, three sets of rules to follow” problem.

Do you happen to have an alternative for this idea? Preferably, one that would work with the Lemmyverse now?

When I registered 2y ago I didn’t think that I’d stick around for so long.
I’m glad that I did.

Translation: “I got my way and I’m going to impose it on everyone across the universe.”

If you genuinely believe that this is an accurate “translation” of what I wrote, then I can’t help but heavily question your basic reading comprehension and your ability to reason (given the blatant assumption).

In other words. Could you be a dead weight elsewhere? Shoo.

Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg:

Already addressed - a lot of those issues will still affect you, even if you don’t use the karma system.

Let’s say that instances A (karma disabled) and B (karma enabled) federate. A users won’t get the karma system itself, but they’ll still get: less varied and less interesting content, stronger echo chambers, and higher concentration of users in oversized and unruly comms. Because they use the same comms as the B users and thus the behaviour of B users affect A.

Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.

Downvotes are a mixed feature, with pros and cons.
Karma looks good from a distance, but upon closer inspection it’s only cons. (Including enabling shitty=assumptive mod practices.)

You’re already on .ml, so…

I am clearly not talking about my individual usage here. I’m talking about users in general and the Lemmyverse as a whole.

The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it.

I’m not sure on what’s supposed to be the [ipsis digitis] “whole shtick of Lemmy”, and I’m not assuming it.

The removal of the scores from the API seems [for me] heavy-handed and feels [for me] like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.

For me it looks like a sensible decision that takes into account its impact into users and the Lemmyverse.

EDIT: I’ll go further. Dunno if the devs agree with this or not, but I believe that “user aggregate score” = karma also attracts and retains users with the wrong mindset - who are not here to share, contribute or be part of something social and collective; but instead to farm virtual e-peen points for the sake of their individual egos. And I believe that this “it’s all about MEEE! ME! ME!” mindset is part of what makes Reddit such a dumpster fire.

I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:

• It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
• It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
• It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
• It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
• It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.

Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.

A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.

And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.

As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.

Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.

This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.

You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).

So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.

Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.

And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.

What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:

• the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
• there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
• there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
• some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.

e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.

IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]

Scaled sorting is amazing. A few comms that I found in the front page, that I genuinely did not know about:

• [email protected] (programmer memes from Mexico)
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

I’m following the later for sure.

Assumer, my comment gives you no grounds to claim anything about my emotional state.

However, your comment does give me grounds to say that you’re mostly dead weight here, and that you’d do everyone in Kbin and Lemmy a favour if you stayed in Reddit.

I believe that most people are here due to the APIcalypse, like you.

And… really, before that, this place was a ghost town. Then you had all that huge influx of newbies, so Lemmy became actually usable, albeit messy. Now things settled down and, although plenty users still behave like they were in Reddit, I feel like Lemmy already has its own culture.

I always think of the Koopa kid

I usually think of this:

Fucking Lemmings. I lost a good chunk of my childhood playing it. (I don’t regret it.)

[nougat@kbin.social] No idea, I don’t use it.

Your very comment, that boils down to “I have nothing to contribute but since I’m an entitled prick I’ll still add noise to the discussion” is proof of its own inaccuracy - you’re submitting a[n extremely insightless] comment to a Lemmy thread, created by a Lemmy user in a Lemmy community, while interacting with Lemmy users. You are using Lemmy as a community, even if not using the software.

Reddit event from July 2023, when Steve “Greedy Pigboy” Huffman decided to demand exorbitant amounts of money for API access, effectively killing most third party applications used to access the site from a phone, and neutering the leftover. It had a huge impact on Lemmy, for obvious reasons.

At least in a short time frame (2w? 1m?) I don’t think that Lemmy got meaningfully better or worse. However from APIcalypse times to now it got way better.

I don’t know (…or care, really) about USA so I’ll speak on more general grounds.

There’s a lot of stuff in social media that makes it a great soapbox for social manipulation:

• low cost, wide reaching: it’s easy to be heard
• decontextualisation: it gives more room for assumers¹ to do their shit, and make an incorrect context out of nowhere.
• virality: it’s easy to start a witch hunt. Cue to the pitchfork emporium / Twitter MC of the day.
• upvote/like-based systems: people don’t upvote your content (increasing its visibility) because you’re right, they do it because you say it confidently.
• on the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog: concern trolling made easy.

Now look at what @[email protected] said: “Dunno man, seems like it might be the fascists.”. IMO that user is being spot on, those five things make social media specially easy to manipulate for fascists². And they’re mostly the ones creating this dichotomisation of society³, because that’s how they’re able to congregate the nutjobs into a political discourse. Suddenly the village idiot doesn’t simply say “they’re hiding aliens from us” (stupid, but morally OK), the discourse becomes “the Jews are hiding aliens from us” (stupid and Antisemitic).

1. By “assumers” I mean individuals who are quick to draw conclusions based on little to no reasoning, evidence, or thought. This plague exists since the dawn of time, it’s just that decontextualisation gives them more room to assume shit out of nowhere.
2. Fascists often babble about “virtue signalling”, without realising that themselves are prone to signal adherence to their stupid beliefs. They don’t want to be in the receiving end of their own witch hunts.
3. By “society” I mean at the very least Western Europe plus the Americas; probably more. It is not exclusive to USA.

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.